In a recent post I looked at the Thunderbolt feature that has now been certified by Intel on two of ASUS’ recently launched motherboards – the ASUS P8Z77-V Premium and the ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt. Seeing as I was all about connectivity last time, I thought it would be a good idea to poke around inside the boards and see what other features they have.
The P8Z77-V Premium motherboard has several new features that include the true 4-way Nvidia SLi and 4-way AMD CrossFireX on the PCIe Gen 3.0 slots. You will also discover advanced SSD Caching II so you can cache frequently used programs and files using multiple SSDs for an instant system upgrade. Combined, they also mean better gaming performance across the board.
The P8Z77-V Premium has a 32GB mSATA SSD onboard for Intel Smart Response and Rapid Start Technology – nice boot times promised there – and a pair of Gigabit Intel LAN ports. The CPU socket for both boards is the Intel 1155 for third and second generation core i7 or i% processors, Core i3, Pentium/Celeron processors.
Both boards boast plenty of memory with digital phase power. The Premium has digital 20-phase and the Pro/Thunderbolt has 12-phase. Plenty of connectivity options surround these ASUS motherboards which is always a good thing.
The boards are well proportioned in terms of features, connectivity and power and it is going to be interesting to try one of them out in the future, to really see how far they can be pushed and how well Thunderbolt works in conjunction with legacy systems.
Tamsin